A Beautiful Death: Die well in the end by practicing now
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“I am a servant, and I am already dead.”
In 2012, I started working as a part-time chaplain at a hospital. After training for a couple weeks, I got my first page. (Yes, we still used pagers in 2012.)
By the time I got to the hospital, the man was already dead. When I walked into the room, something was different. I was pretty new, but I had seen my share of geriatric deaths. All the things were in place. The IV stand was where it always was. Monitors, hospital bed, paperwork and everything was in its place. Even the sterile wrappers from the various implements were in their predictable places on the floor from the frantic push to save a man’s life. But something was different.
And all the sudden, I put my finger on it. This man knew Jesus. As I looked at his old body, I felt an almost palpable substance filling the room, and I knew where that man really was. Even the corners of his mouth were turned up slightly, belying a smile he didn’t have time to finish making.
His death was different. His death was beautiful.
Normally, I avoid asking because it usually does no good for the people who are left. But I couldn’t help but ask his wife, “Did he know Jesus?” The broken woman in front of me came back together as she remembered her hope. “Oh yes he did. Absolutely he did. He followed Jesus with his whole life.”
During my time at the hospital, I was often there for the worst moment in a person’s life. I learned that some people manage to handle the junk life throws well, and others fall completely apart. Some people die well, and others die struggling and crying out.
As I talked to her about her husband’s life, I discovered the secret that has begun to guide my own. He was able to die well because he had been practicing for much of his life.
The only struggle in the Christian life is against self-interest; the only solution is the continual, personal adoption of Jesus’ death and resurrection as our own. In the coming weeks, I’ll explore what exactly it means to die before we die.
Jesus calls all people who believe in him to live out a life of death. He said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:24-25). The cross was the most painful way humans had ever invented to kill each other. Jesus demanded his disciples associate their own lives with the lowest form of death before they even knew that he would adopt that kind of death himself.
And his disciples did just that.
After Peter and John were beaten, they didn’t complain or retaliate or sue. They rejoiced “that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name” (Acts 5:41). Jesus had been whipped just like they had been. They were doing their job representing Jesus well.
Paul told the elders in Ephesus, “I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24). And he put his money where his mouth was.
Some people point to their education or success stories for their credentials. Paul’s credentials were that he had, “far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure” (2 Corinthians 11:23-27).
Peter was crucified upside-down. John was poisoned, survived and was exiled to a rock in the middle of the Mediterranean to starve. Paul was beheaded. How could they die that way? How could they stay faithful and hold on through those kinds of deaths? They had been practicing.
A common verse at funerals is Psalm 116:15. “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.” The life that is precious to the Lord, then, is the one in which his saint practices their own death every day. Death to self. Death to self-interest. Death to comfort. Death to sin. Death to our own will. That kind of life is precious in the sight of the Lord. That’s the kind of life I want to learn to live, and I want you to join me.
That is why my motto is at the bottom of every email, and I repeat it to myself before my feet hit the floor every morning. “I am a servant, and I am already dead."